


Name Calling

by cedarcliffe



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Weechesters, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-20
Updated: 2012-04-20
Packaged: 2017-11-04 00:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/387782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cedarcliffe/pseuds/cedarcliffe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sammy is a chubby twelve year old. It’s Sam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Name Calling

Dean blows into the apartment like he always does, quick flash of teeth and an upwards jerk of his chin when Sam meets his gaze, the silent how-you-doin’ that’s just a little too bawdy and exaggerated to be anything like the one he gives to slender-waisted, large-chested girls. He slings his road-dusty duffel into a chair and shucks off his coat, rubs his hands together to warm them and says, Whatcha want for dinner, Sammy?  
It’s Sam.

Dean pauses, unsure. He turns his head to eye his brother, hunched over a textbook on the couch, and…yeah, it’s Sam. It sure is Sam.

Say’gain?

A frustrated, bitten hiss of a sigh. Rasp of a sharply turned page.

 _Sammy_ is a chubby twelve year old. It’s _Sam_.

For a moment, Dean doesn’t do anything at all. He just stares, slack-jawed and dumbfounded because this has never happened before. This is new. As long as he’s lived, Sam’s never stared at him in that dull, resentful way, not for calling him _Sammy_ for godsake, that’s his _name_ , but his shoulders are curled stiffly inward, fingers clenched hard around the book in his lap and an affronted pinch in his lips. A muscle leaps from his jaw to his temple, and sometime between one moment and the next Dean must have looked away, because there’s a shadow of stubble on his baby brother’s chin and a foreign look in his eyes and his beautiful boy’s been replaced by this defensive, angry young _man_ and he _missed_ it.

How could he have _missed_ _it_?

He thinks, Oh, _god_ , and he says, Shut the fuck up, _Sammy_ , you’re fourteen, you don’t know what you’re talking about. His lips feel numb and bloodless around every word.

Sam’s up off the couch and in his face in an instant, shouting something, shoving him back into the wall with a force he doesn’t expect and then hooking his long, slender fingers in the front of his shirt, pushing and pulling and slamming him against the cracking plaster. Sam is all lashing, impotent rage. Yelling, maybe crying, hair in his face obscuring the finer points of his expression and leaving behind bared teeth, lips pulled back in a grimace and dimples carved into his cheeks like wounds. Don’t treat me like a kid, Dean. I’m not a kid.

Course you are, Dean sneers on autopilot, and he knows immediately it’s the wrong thing to do and the wrong thing to say but _shit_ , this is _Sammy_ , this is _his_ Sammy. Course he’s a kid. He’ll always be.

Sam hits him.

It takes a moment to fully register.

Sideways snap of his head. Deep, dizzying, reverberating pain, the carpet lurching up as he catches himself on the wall. He blinks to clear his swaying vision. His cheek throbs.

When he can see the shapes of things again, he looks up at the vicious stranger wearing his brother’s skin. It doesn’t satisfy him much that he flinches. But then Sam draws himself up, tilts his chin, narrows his eyes as the corner of his lip twists into a derogatory smirk, and this is a new thing, a thing Sammy has never done before, and it looks so _wrong_ on him.

Fuck you, he says.

Fuck you, Dean, Sam says.

He turns on his heel. A door slams.

By all rights Dean should go in there and wring Sammy out for this combination of insult and injury. As his big brother, he should. It’s his right to take all of this shock and anger out on Sammy’s skin, to bruise him and pull his hair and bend his arm up behind his back until he yelps and bucks and finally begs. He can. He _should_.

He doesn’t.

—

It doesn’t make sense, the way Sammy reacted.

Sam. Not Sammy. But his name sounds wrong like that, too short, too clipped, and Dean’s tongue trips forward automatically. Even in his head.

His fingers slide back and forth over the burgeoning bruise on his cheek, mottled red and purple shifting unevenly beneath the delicate pressure of his touch in the shape of his brother’s sharp, bony knuckles. He blinks at himself in the bathroom mirror.

It doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make _sense_.

—

Sam is tired of this. Tired of being left behind, being four years too late to every milestone. Every time Dean calls him Sammy it’s like he’s naming the days that separate them, all fifteen hundred and fifty-nine of them because _yes_ , Sam has counted, and he _fucking hates that number_. But not as much as he hates that _name_ , the name that sets the gap between them into syllables that drop like stones in Sam’s stomach. That littleboylittlebabylittlebrother _Sammy_.

Dean has no such name. Nothing Sam can call him to bring him down a notch, make him _equal_. Dee is what Sam called him when he was too small to tag on the last of it. Deano is dad’s word, affection masked in gruffness after a job well done. There’s nothing, absolutely _nothing_ , and god fucking _damnit_ but Sam is so _tired_ of being _small_.

Because Dean is big. Dean is grown. Lean muscle and sweat-sparkling skin on every golden afternoon, strong and hard-edged and beautiful, and Sam is fourteen. Fourteen and everything the age entails. He’s awkward in his angles, baby fat melting away into long, skinny arms and too-big hands, too-big feet, the notches in his spine bristling sharp because apparently he’s got more bone than flesh these days. He’s clumsy and fumbling, constantly uncomfortable in his own skin. His thoughts turn in ways unexpected and unfamiliar and leave him unbalanced and unsure.

So when Dean blusters in all sloppyslick with a snapping smile, sweat-stained and _gorgeous_ , so goddamn gorgeous, and says that _fucking_ name, _Sammy_ —

Sam breaks wide open.


End file.
